The Rogue to Success

I'm not sure. If 100 Rogues hadn't been formally reviewed or got good formal reviews... I don't know. I could answer that better if I'd had more games out on the App Store, then I could compare and - 'this one got five star reviews from everyone and sold like this...' I don't really have enough data to answer that. I can only imagine that good reviews help and bad reviews don't help.

It would be something I'd have to think about. My first reaction is to say, no absolutely not. That would basically be like working in Dunkin' Donuts for us - it'd be just a job. It's not why we got into the games industry.

I think that attitude is a serious problem. That's basically saying, and I think I can say this because it's basically what's happening, get an IP which everyone knows, then just copy another game and re-skin it.

You know, 'this is Halo, but with, I don't know, Jurassic Park', something everyone knows and loves. I think that is causing massive damage. Not just to the industry but to people's perception of games. I'm a real fighter for games' legitimacy. I really want people to understand that games are important, that games are culturally relevant. I really resent that kind of attitude, it holds us back.

But would I do it? I may, if I was really struggling. I wouldn't be happy about it though. I have a bunch of friends who work in the industry and I would not want to work at a big, triple-A studio. I mean it's not something I would remotely want to do. I'm very happy to be where I am, an indie who can actually make creative decisions. Make the games I want to make.

Eventually, eventually, we're going to go in the good direction. One way or the other. We'll either go because people chose to go that way and there was a nice, smooth transition - or there's going to be a lot of serious turmoil, and something like a crash, then eventually out of that will rise a smaller industry.

I think that the industry, in the future, will be a lot smaller. I think that video games have achieved, in the last 20 years, this bizarre, rockstar status in our culture. Because of that, our industry has become way bigger that it ought to be.

That causes a lot of problems because when the industry is that big, and you get studios that are that big, you have to do the sort of stuff that Eric Brown was talking about. It's not their fault, they're right. When you get to that sort of outrageous size, you do have to do that sort of stuff. Everything is going to get smaller. Games are always going to be important, they're always going to be huge, but they're a little bit crazy right now.

If you look at board games - it's an industry that's doing pretty well, but there's a lot of quality. It's mostly people who are really into games who are into it, it doesn't have the same status as video games, where everybody is supposed to be super into it. I think that the way that the boardgame industry looks is something like the way we can imagine a future video games industry looking.